Since my recent brief toe in the SQL waters, I have been pondering the odd hour of coding. I may be kidding myself as to what I am up to but this keeps mulling over in my mind.

The question is, what language to use? In the past I have used quite a list of languages but, judging by my SQL re-learning episode, re-learning anything I used to know twelve years ago is going to be tough going.

So, I need something:• easy to (re-)learn• that I can do on my mac and will run on the mac, maybe as some kind of chron job• that will be free to use• that will hopefully, eventually, be able to read data from an RSS feed and be able to interface to the LJ API or send an email to an email address that I know is valid but that cannot click a link to confirm that it is a human (e.g. my LJ's email posting address), i.e. have language capabilities and interfaces that will let me maybe write code to do that.

I may be overreaching myself, my current abilities, my memory and learning capability and the spears/spoons available to me but I do still really enjoy learning and I keep having these coding bunnies (like plot bunnies) - ideas of apps that would be really useful that I cannot find via google.

Those of you that write code, what would you suggest? Am I mad given the multiple sclerosis to even contemplate this? Does something already exist?